In a distribution system, a retailer or other product distributor (which may collectively be referred to as distributors) typically maintains an inventory of various items at one or more distribution centers, fulfillment centers, cross-docking facilities, materials handling facilities or warehouses (which may collectively be referred to herein as fulfillment centers). The inventory items are ordered from one or more vendors, received at the materials handling facilities as inbound shipments, and stocked in inventory of the materials handling facilities. In an order fulfillment process, orders for items may be received from customers of the distributor. Units of the ordered items are picked from various locations in the inventory in the materials handling facilities, processed for shipping, and shipped as outbound shipments to the customers.
The order fulfillment process may include a sortation process, in which units of items picked for orders are sorted into their respective orders. For example, requests (e.g., orders) for units of items from requestors may be divided among multiple agents, who then pick units corresponding to the requests. The orders may be subdivided among the agents; therefore, two or more of the agents may pick units for one order. Consequently, a sort operation to select the proper units of items for given orders from the aggregations of units returned by each respective agent is required. Conventionally, sorting may be performed using automated sorting mechanisms or manual sorting systems. Automated sorting mechanisms for sorting certain types of inventory units according to individual orders include, but are not limited to, the Crisplant® sorter, Eurosort® sorters, and automated sorting mechanisms offered by other vendors. Using an automated sorting mechanism, incoming picked units of items for multiple different customer orders are received at the automated sorting mechanism and sorted by the automated mechanism according to individual shipments. Once items are sorted into respective shipments, each shipment can be packaged and shipped to respective customers.
Error Prone Manual Sortation Techniques
Instead of using completely automated or mechanized sorting techniques, some sortation systems direct agents to sort items into respective shipments. For example, one of such agents may be responsible for separating a given workload of ordered items into respective shipments to be sent to customers as specified by a sortation system. Errors in the composition of sorted shipments, such as shipments with too few or too many of a given item, can occur even in cases where the sortation system correctly specifies to which shipment a given item is to be sorted. For example, due in part to the shear number of shipments an agent may be sorting at any given moment, an agent may mistakenly sort a given item to the wrong shipment. Such a mistake can create a shortage of the given item in one shipment and an overage of the item in another shipment.
While various embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that various embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of various embodiments as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.